Thread

1. jakozaur · 1790086399 · focus · HN ↗

   Typically, for AI training, you need human feedback. If AI were enough, then OpenAI would do it themselves. Though we all know how bad AI slop is, running it in a loop can lead to unreadable sentences.

   They hired contractors on the condition that they provide human feedback without AI; those people broke the rules, so their contracts ended prematurely.

   Not sure why this is news uncovered by an investigative journalist.

   1. fwlr · 1790087659 · focus · HN ↗

      “Suppose the government puts a certain drug in the water supply … A couple of conspiracy nuts say it makes your fingers fall off one by one, but the government says that’s ridiculous … However, government employees are all observed drinking bottled water exclusively, and if anyone suggests that government employees might also want to take the completely innocuous drug, they freak out … If by chance you manage to slip a little bit of tap water into a government employee’s drink, and he finds out about it, he runs around shrieking like a banshee and occasionally yelling “AAAAAAH! MY FINGERS! MY PRECIOUS FINGERS!”. At some point you might start to wonder whether the government was being entirely honest with you.”

      What is it, exactly, that makes AI-generated text so poisonous to AIs but totally harmless to humans? What is mode/model collapse, and why can it only happen to AIs with too much AI text in their training data and not to, say, human students with too much AI text in their textbooks? The people who know the most about this phenomenon seem much more careful about contamination than they are encouraging us to be.

      1. yunwal · 1790088058 · focus · HN ↗

         I don't think anyone is saying it's poisonous here? The people were hired to do a job and they didn't do it. Feels like you're being disingenuous, if there's one thing i know about AI employees, it's that they use LLMs, like, all the time.

         1. fwlr · 1790089207 · focus · HN ↗

            Are you having trouble following the metaphor? In it, I would be the conspiracy theorist saying it’s poisonous, and OpenAI would be the government saying it’s harmless but it’s also a fireable offense to feed it to us and we’ve hired a second set of contractors to watch for any violation of this rule.

            (I’m not trying to be disingenuous, though I am trying to express a niche viewpoint. Hopefully, my willingness to take the metaphorical role of conspiracy theorist is understood as epistemic humility.)

            1. redanddead · 1790091056 · focus · HN ↗

               It’s a good metaphor, your point is valid

               He’s being too literal

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